Chapter 1 Operations research in the public sector: An introduction and a brief history

Pollock, Stephen M.; Maltz, Michael D.

doi:10.1016/s0927-0507(05)80082-9

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Then in the 1960s OR in some sense returned to its 19th century roots and started to again become more widely used in the public sector ( Pollock and Maltz, 1994). In the United States, the impetus came from the social strife of the 1960s coupled with the advent of the Johnson Administration's ''Great Society'' programs.…”

Section: Or In Public Policy and In Africa: Applicability And Currentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations Research and public policy for Africa: harnessing the revolution in management science instruction

Caulkins

Eelman

Ratnatunga

et al. 2008

Int Trans Operational Res

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Operations Research (OR) has made major contributions in the developed world to public policy domains that are of great relevance to Africa. Inasmuch as OR has failed to live up to its potential for addressing such issues in Africa, a principal barrier may have been distance between OR analysts and decision makers. However, the revolution in management science instruction and potential to train end‐user modelers has democratized OR. This makes training for policy makers and managers in the public and non‐profit sectors in Africa both feasible and highly beneficial. Existing management science courses for public and non‐profit leaders, such as those taught at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School, could be adapted to fit the needs of educators and policy makers in Africa and disseminated via a “train the trainers” approach. A plan is sketched whereby 800,000 end‐user modelers might be trained in Africa (one for every 1000 people) at an annual cost of about $5 million/year. Such budgets are well within the range of investments in human capital formation currently being made in Africa.

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Section: Or In Public Policy and In Africa: Applicability And Currentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations Research and public policy for Africa: harnessing the revolution in management science instruction

Caulkins

Eelman

Ratnatunga

et al. 2008

Int Trans Operational Res

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“…Fundamentally, community-based OR addresses public-sector problems, that is, problems in which the primary outcome measure to be optimized is not a direct representation-or proxy for-shareholder benefit and in which the outputs are subject to public scrutiny (see, e.g., Pollock and Maltz [75], p. 6). Community-based OR is a subfield of public-sector OR (see e.g., Pollock et al [76], Larson and Odoni [60]), which emphasizes most strongly the needs and concerns of disadvantaged human stakeholders in well-defined neighborhoods.…”

Section: Defining Community-based Ormentioning

confidence: 99%

Community-Based Operations Research

Johnson¹,

Smilowitz²

2007

Or Tools and Applications: Glimpses of Future Technologies

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Community-based operations research is defined as the collection of analytical methods applied to problem domains in which interests of underrepresented, underserved, or vulnerable populations in localized jurisdictions, formal or informal, receive special emphasis, and for which solutions to problems of core concern for daily living must be identified and implemented so as to jointly optimize economic efficiency, social equity, and administrative burdens. As such, it represents a specific domain within public-sector OR. Community-based operations research (OR) problems tend to be "messy" and highly dependent on political and social considerations. Nevertheless, solution of these problems is essential to the continued health and well-being of individuals, families, communities, and entire regions. This tutorial emphasizes current research in a variety of application areas. We identify a tension between problems that reflect unique characteristics of local communities and those that represent more general characteristics that bridge diverse communities. We propose principles for bridging the gap between quantitative model-and method-based approaches typically associated with private-sector problems, and qualitative policy and process-oriented approaches typically associated with public-sector problems. We examine two research applications in detail: food security and affordable housing. In so doing we emphasize the commonality of problem attributes and the diversity of modeling and solution methods.

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“…The beginnings of the intersection between OR and issues of crime and justice are rooted in the works of two nineteenth-century European statisticians, Adolphe Quetelet and Sim6on-Denis Poisson, discussed briefly below (see also Pollock and Maltz, 1994). But the greatest attention is given to the work that has taken place more recently, primarily in the past 30 years, and for the most part, in the published literature.…”

Section: Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although France and other European countries had been collecting criminal justice data for years, similar statistics for the United States were not so easy to obtain (Pollock and Maltz, 1994): whereas France had (and has) a centralized criminal justice system, in the United States virtually every state, county, and municipality has its own criminal justice agency, making standardization of crime statistics a major obstacle to their collection, one that has not been overcome to this day. 9…”

Section: The Early Twentieth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

From Poisson to the present: Applying operations research to problems of crime and justice

Maltz

1996

J Quant Criminol

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In the 1830s Simron-Denis Poisson developed the distribution that bears his name, basing it on the binomial distribution. He used it to show how the inherent variance in jury decisions affected the inferences that could be made about the probability of conviction in French courts. In recent years there have been a number of examples where researchers have either ignored or forgotten this inherent variance, and how operations research, in particular mathematical modeling, can be used to incorporate this variance in analyses. These are described in this paper, as well as other contributions made by operations research to the study of crime and criminal justice.

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Chapter 1 Operations research in the public sector: An introduction and a brief history

Cited by 14 publications

References 19 publications

Operations Research and public policy for Africa: harnessing the revolution in management science instruction

Operations Research and public policy for Africa: harnessing the revolution in management science instruction

Community-Based Operations Research

From Poisson to the present: Applying operations research to problems of crime and justice

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